New Needs for Gladys

Although we have not taken on any major projects in the last three days, we have made significant progress and discoveries as we continue to work on Gladys.

Our goal now that the laundry room is complete is to take a little time for us.  We did that this past week while Bonnie was here, and we continued that on Wednesday when we finally dusted off our bikes, pumped up all six tires, and took a little ride.  Something there is, however, that does not want us to ride those bikes on a consistent basis.  Yesterday the weather was so warm (89 degrees in the middle of the day) that we substituted a gentle walk on the Pinellas Trail instead of a more vigorous bike ride.  Today we awoke to 35 mph wind gusts and rain.

The good thing about the rain, in addition to the fact that Dunedin needs it, is that it forced us to stay indoors and to finish our list of "must do" projects before tomorrow.  More on that in a minute...

(Note to my siter-in-law Chris: it is supposed to rain all week, so your flowers are all growing very well.  Your neighbor must be watering those in front, but even those in the back are growing like weeds and look quite beautiful.  You may find you have a whole yard of survivors that are established by the time you return.)

On Thursday we had a worker from the flooring company that refinished all of our terrazzo floors come back to the house to see if he could get out the stain across the Florida room floor using a new poultice that the owner concocted.  We asked for Rob, but we were told that Bill was in the area, and that he would be coming to the house.  Although Bill was nice, he was far from encouraging about the stain.  He acted like he really did not want to be bothered with the job, and he was quite blunt that he did not think the process would work.  He said he would try the poultice on a test spot.  He went to his truck and brought in a five gallon bucket. He said he had a little of the poultice left over from the job he just finished, so he put that on one small part of the stain.

Rick and I have no doubt that it will not work.  Anyone who has ever worked with tile and Thinset knows that if the Thinset sits for too long, it loses its effectiveness.  Any tile put down with old, half-dried out Thinset probably will not adhere to the floor. What Bill put on our floor was scraped from the bottom of the bucket, and most of it was stiff and already dried out. Like Thinset, this poultice should be moist and fresh since the drying process is what draws the oils out of the stain and floor.  Since this poultice was already half dried, we know that it will not work.  We are thoroughly disgusted with the company for whom Bill works, and his actions will cause his company to completely lose out on probably a $200 attempt on trying to rid the floor of the stain.  We will look further, next year, for a different company to take care of our floors from this point forward.

One of the other things we did in the past couple of days is to talk with our insurance agent.  We took out supplemental liability insurance since our homeowner's insurance dropped everyone's liability from $300,000 to $100,000.  Since Gladys is now our primary home, if someone were injured on our property and sued us, we would risk losing our Wisconsin home if anyone injured sued us and won the claim.

While we were in his office, we also set into motion what we needed to do to change insurance agents.  Right now we have auto insurance with an Allstate agent here in Dunedin, but our Citizen's homeowner's insurance with an agent in Tarpon Springs.  To put it politely, we do not like that agent for various reasons, so we want to change to the Allstate agent (who also handles Citizen's Insurance) here in town.  Unfortunately, Citizen's Insurance is less than helpful (or logical, for that matter), so we have to drop our policy with the Tarpon agent and take out a whole new policy with the agent here in Dunedin.  How backward, in this day of computers, is that?

At any rate, if we want the new insurance, we need to have a new 4-point inspection of Gladys.  In truth, while this will cost us $95, it is something that we would like to have. I have long believed that knowledge is power, and the more that we learn about Gladys, the more we will be able to make her safe and secure.  We knew that some minor things would have to be updated before the inspector comes tomorrow, so we spent the last two days doing some of those small jobs.

One of those jobs was the electricity. We knew that one outlet in the master bathroom, which we never use, still needed to be updated to a ground fault interrupter (GFI) circuit because the outlet is within three feet of the sink. We also needed to put a GFI outlet for the washer in the laundry room and another outlet in the countertop in the kitchen.  While we were at it, we also replaced another outlet in the kitchen with a 20 amp outlet so everything is now GFI protected, 20 amp, and up to code.

Before the rains set in this morning, Rick also climbed up on Gladys' roof to add some roof caulk around the sleeve that rests on the bottom of her electrical mast.  A stroll around the roof revealed a few other places where the caulk certainly did no harm and it revealed a further truth: Gladys needs a new hat!  We know that the roof was replaced in 2002, so we had hoped that we could get at least 15 - 20 years out of it; however, that is not meant to be. The shingles have not weathered well, and we know that Gladys' hat is both ragged and threadbare in places. Rick patched where he could, but we can no longer ignore the fact that we need to replace the roof within the next year or two... at the most.

A final job today was to put smoke alarms in Gladys just to wake the old girl and us up in case she has a serious hot flash.  By code, we need a smoke alarm in both bedrooms and in the hallway outside the bedrooms.  For anyone who knows Gladys, that code is rather ridiculous since it puts three smoke alarms within 10 feet of one another while leaving the whole north part of the house with nothing. We did add an alarm in each of the bedrooms and put the third one in the hallway but positioned a bit more toward the living room and thus, the north part of the house.

We'll be interested to see what the inspector looks for and what else, if anything, we should do to make Gladys the best that we, and our budget, can afford to give her.  A part of the insurance also is to pay for a sinkhole assessment since we want to have sinkhole insurance.  We are hoping that the sinkhole inspection tells us that Gladys is situated on sound ground. If not, at least we will have the knowledge to know about a potential problem, and that knowledge will give us the power to make decisions to keep Gladys sound and secure.